Liars Who Believe Their Own Lies?
What do Williams Gehris, America’s most decorated war hero, and Walter Williams, our last Civil War veteran to pass away, have in common?
Both were frauds: they spun tales of military heroism, duped the public, and then – whoops – someone discovered that they hadn’t actually achieved the purported feats. Gehris professed to have racked up 54 decorations, when really he just had one. And Williams claimed to have fought in the Civil War, but records prove he couldn’t have – he was only five at the time!
I came across these and other military fish tales in the article “Fake War Stories Exposed,” in which Anne Morse covers frauds from all walks of life (journalists, actors, politicians, clergymen) who had all kinds of motives (money, glory, self-esteem). That so many “veterans” could pull the wool over our eyes is remarkable, but what’s even more striking is that many of them seem to have convinced even themselves.
Take for example our decorated war hero from above, Williams Gehris: when a reporter confronted him about his lies, Gehris responded with the incredible “There are people who don’t believe 6 million Jews were killed, either.”
Or how about former military chaplain and purported Vietnam veteran Gary Probst? Morse writes that when Probst was confronted about his lies, he “claimed he’d lied for the Lord: His phony heroics, he explained, allowed him to gain the trust of his flock – which made his fibs a good and helpful thing.”
And then there’s my personal favorite, former Connecticut state representative (and yet another Vietnam faker) Robert Sorensen, who came up with this exquisite response to the disclosure: “For the first time ever, the American public had before them a war in their living rooms… Every single person in this United States fought in that war in Vietnam. We all felt the anguish that those people felt. So in a sense I was there.”
It’s possible, of course, that these conmen fully realized all along what they were doing and they only gave their feeble excuses out of a last-ditch effort to save themselves. But given what we know about the power of the mind to self-deceive – how it can rationalize anything and rework all kinds of memories – I suspect that many of these men had actually come to view their fibs as truth.
Maybe Lenin was correct when he said: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
.
Did you mean “William Gehris”? (not Williams)
I have worked for people like this. They truly believe their lies. Additionally, another quality that seems to accompany this trait is the belief that if you are not for the person, you are against them. No in between.
So, what is the limit for these guys? My dad is one such person and he comes up with ALL kinda reasons for saving his lies.He is very successful so far. Would such people turn lunatics after a while? Shouldn’t there be a limit for this?
Many advertisers must love Lenin
. . . Motivated False Memories . . .
There has been a plethora of research in the motivated reasoning literature showing that people can rationalize anything to fit an opinion or judgment (i.e. how preferences affect how we evaluate information, or how Fox News sees Steve Brown’s celebrity status as good, but Obama’s celebrity status as bad -the Daily Show does a great job of pointing this out on both sides of the political spectrum).
But for people like Gehris who “professed to have racked up 54 decorations, when really he just had one” that might take more than just rationalization, it might require self-serving memory alteration, or a “Motivated False Memory.”
Some Types of Motivated Memory
-Behavior Frequency- When people are told tooth brushing is a good thing they remember having brushed their teeth more often. A similar finding was found when people were told behaving in an extraverted or an introverted manner was a good thing.
-Imagination – When we imagined events that did not happen but we wanted those events to have happened, we express more confidence that they did happen.
-Forgetting Word Pairs – When people are motivated to forget word pairs they saw, their hippocampus, the memory part of the brain, partially shuts down.
-Visual Motivated False Memories – At the SPSP conference in Las Vegas this week, my fellow UC Irvine students and I from the Peter Ditto (motivated reasoning) & Elizabeth Loftus (false memories) Labs are presenting a new finding. In our study participants remembered physically interacting with a different person than they actually did when it supported their self serving motivations. This study suggests self-serving motivations are sufficient to create a visual false memory of a real life detail.
Also, work by Harvard professor Micheal Norton and student Zoe Chance studies and review of literature “suggest that when people do not get what they want, they may fool themselves into believing they wanted what they got. People appear to forget their original decisions when those decisions were difficult, allowing them to later be happy with options they may have rejected earlier.”
Full Article Here: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/10-018.pdf
Say, didn’t a recent politician come under fire from imaginary bullets?
I have met people like this in Silicon Valley. They may be mentally ill, for instance with Narcissistic, Histrionic or Borderline Personality Disorder, aka Cluster B Personality Disorders.
That doesn’t excuse their behavior, but does help to explain it. And can help you understand how to deal with a difficult situation.
Wow this is a great resource.. I’m enjoying it.. good article